What is the ‘visual dominance ratio’ in psychology?

This refers to a metric used by psychologists to measure a person’s dominance over fellow human beings by gauging her eye contact behaviour during interactions.

The visual dominance ratio (VDR) is calculated by dividing the percentage of time a person looks into another person’s eyes while speaking by the percentage of time she looks into the other person’s eyes while listening.

It yields higher values when a person holds greater eye contact during speaking than while listening.

A high VDR is said to indicate a high degree of dominance while a low VDR is supposed to indicate an attitude of subservience.